# S01E10 · Transcript — Hershawn Arora Full transcript of [The Useful Podcast](https://useful.ventures/podcast) Episode 10, a founder-to-founder conversation between host Gokul Bala and Hershawn Arora, "The Short King," stand-up comedian and host of the Short King Comedy Tour. Back to the [episode page](https://useful.ventures/podcast/hershawn-arora-comedy). This transcript has been lightly edited for readability. Filler words and false starts have been removed and the meaning has been preserved. Any errors are mine, not Hershawn's. ## Words, from the courtroom to the mic **Gokul** Even in elementary school you started rapping and emulating Eminem. What got you into that? **Hershawn** I always gravitated to that genre. My cousins put me on to hip hop, and Eminem was the coolest guy in it at the time, so naturally you emulate the people you like. But I also had an affinity for words before that — my dad is a court interpreter and translator, so I think seeing how technical Eminem was with his verses, every syllable rhyming with the last, combined with growing up around someone whose job was precision with language, is what really pulled me in. **Gokul** Where did you actually write those early raps — notebook, computer? **Hershawn** My dad recently found the first rap I ever wrote on an old computer, a Microsoft Word document from when I was eight, about getting a library card, weirdly dark for an eight-year-old. These days it's pen to paper in a notepad, or jokes specifically go in a joke book — basically every comedian keeps some version of one. Mine is dozens of notebooks of ideas, mostly setlists at this point. **Gokul** You do crowd work — how does that work alongside a joke book? **Hershawn** Crowd work is what happens when you ditch the notebook. You don't need one for it — you need knowledge, the ability to draw on your experience and make connections in the moment that get a laugh. But crowd work isn't the whole show. If it were, every set would basically be "how'd you meet, what's your job" on repeat. The joke book is for your actual material, your act, your hour — that's what people come to see. ## High school, and finding his voice **Gokul** We barely knew each other in high school. Were you funny back then? **Hershawn** I think I tried to be. I was pretty insecure at the time, but looking back I had some social range — I had at least one friend in every clique, the athletes, the smokers in the parking lot, the chess club. I was never scared of public speaking, and I enjoyed making people laugh, even if I wasn't sure at the time whether I actually was funny. **Gokul** Your first album, *The Hopeless Romantic*, leans hard into vulnerability. How did you go from insecure teenager to wearing that on your sleeve? **Hershawn** Vulnerability is what people really latch onto in any art form, because it's what lets you connect — art is just a form of expression you hope resonates with someone. People might not have gone through your exact situation, but the core feelings, like heartbreak, are close to universal. That's why so many songs about losing someone you love exist, and why they all land. Leaning into what I was actually feeling is what made that album feel real, and I'm still proud of it — it just had its five-year anniversary. I'm pretty sure I'm the only person who still listens to it, based on my Apple Music recap emails, but it's a fire album. ## From pharmacology to punchlines **Gokul** You graduated with a 3.91 GPA in pharmacology and physiology while doing Alzheimer's research, and you were also VP of your university's comedy club. How did that combination happen? **Hershawn** Coming out of high school I actually wanted to go into film studies — we had a class called Comtech where I was editing videos, doing YouTube montages, learning software, and I loved it. My dad pushed back, not unkindly: anyone can pick up a camera and make a movie, and school is really only necessary if a profession requires a specific credential. That reasoning shifted me toward medical science, something I could actually turn into a defined career. In third year, someone told me I reminded them of Aziz Ansari and should try stand-up. I'd already been the person writing down thoughts I thought were funny just for conversation, without realizing that's essentially what stand-up is: an idea, delivered in a way that lands for someone who hasn't heard it. I tried it, my friends came to support me, and it went well enough that I decided to keep going. The first three to five years of stand-up is a brutal, demoralizing grind — you're not as good as you think, and you learn everything the hard way. But I liked it enough, and was determined enough to get better, to make it a priority. **Gokul** How does the science background actually show up in your comedy? **Hershawn** It makes me meticulous about structure — physiology is all "this causes this, which leads to that," and I think about jokes the same way: what has to come first so it sets up what comes next. When I'm editing, I'm asking whether a word is actually doing anything. If it's not, it gets cut, and the joke gets tighter and reaches the punchline faster. People on stage just see someone having fun and being himself, but underneath it, turning word vomit into a concise, precise joke is a pretty scientific process. ## Comedy contests and the math that isn't mathing **Gokul** You were named Brampton's Top Comic not long after university. How did that work? **Hershawn** Especially early in a comedy career, you do a lot of contests, and at their core a contest is a pyramid scheme to get new comics to bring their friends to a show so the club makes money. Whoever brings the most friends usually wins, because they get the most votes. I think I only had two people there supporting me, but picked up enough first- and second-place votes from neutral audience members to win — and the prize was fifty bucks. Once you actually do the math, you realize it's not mathing: if the club sells seventy $20 tickets, that's $1,400, and they hand you fifty. So why not bring those same twenty people to your own show, sell them $20 tickets yourself, and make $400? That's the real economy of comedy — it's putting people in seats. **Gokul** Is that basically how Raps and Laughs became what it is? **Hershawn** Essentially, yes. At the start of any creative pursuit it's just your friends and family showing up to support you, whether or not they even like what you're doing. Starting in 2022, I began producing my own shows monthly, hosting them myself, bringing on comics I looked up to, trying to prove I could hold my own and fill a room. I did that for two years. Eventually I realized I was the one selling all fifty tickets every time, mostly to people coming to see me — so I transitioned to headlining, pulling together material into a cohesive hour like you'd see in someone's first special. I've been doing that for about two years now, and it's the same principle: I sell my own tickets, that's where the money is, and it's what lets me keep growing as an artist. **Gokul** When did you realize the math wasn't mathing enough to go independent? **Hershawn** Around five years in. I was hosting a weekly show at a local club for a year — my face on the poster, my show, every Thursday at eight — and getting five dollars a ticket on a twenty-dollar ticket while the club kept the rest. It was great experience and got me sharp, but I was doing all the work to bring people in for five dollars a head. There are plenty of spaces in the city willing to let me run my own show, so once I had the confidence that I could host well on my own, I made the move to keep more of the ticket revenue myself. ## Vulnerability as craft **Gokul** Do you think you can be authentic on every stage you're on? **Hershawn** That's the goal, and if you're not, you're doing yourself and the audience a disservice. But it takes years — the first five, six, even ten years of comedy is basically an imitation of whoever inspired you, while you figure out what makes you unique. Authenticity in comedy can only be built through repetition: going on stage, trying it, getting comfortable being seen, and not being afraid of judgment. You can't write a joke and be done — you have to deliver it, live in that laughter or that silence, and get comfortable there. **Gokul** You have a bit called "We're Not Minorities." Are you sending a deliberate message with it? **Hershawn** Not a hidden one — I try to be pretty explicit. It's easy and hacky to make fun of brown people in a one-dimensional way; that's been done a million times and it puts our people down, which I don't want to do. That specific joke starts from the explicit racism directed at Indians and flips it into all the ways we're actually holding things up — you can't have Rogers without Raj, that kind of thing. It doesn't land in Indian rooms, but it does really well in diverse and white rooms, because it reframes the value we bring instead of putting us down. I try to be intentional about race and culture material: stay neutral at worst, and ideally paint our people in a positive light, or point at things that are universal to immigrant households everywhere, not just brown ones. **Gokul** How do you adjust material depending on who's in the room? **Hershawn** You have to always be aware of who you're talking to. A corporate show with someone's boss and coworkers in the room isn't the place for dirty material — you'll set yourself up for failure. In a rural, mostly white small town, I'm not opening with nuanced Indian cultural material; I build trust with more universal jokes first before going somewhere that requires more context. The goal, ideally, is material so universal you don't have to change who you are for any room — people accept you because you're being vulnerable and speaking to human truths everyone recognizes, not because you tailored yourself to them. I'm still working toward that. ## Roast battles and the Comedy Mothership **Gokul** You competed as an International Roast Battle All-Star at Joe Rogan's club in Austin. How did that come together, and how does a roast battle actually get judged? **Hershawn** Roast Battle has branches in different cities — LA, New York, Toronto, Tokyo, Barcelona — and I was competing in the Toronto league, which works like a ranked ladder: wins earn points. Three judges, usually other comics or roasters, decide two out of three on who wins, though it's usually pretty obvious from the laughs and applause breaks who's funnier. Enough wins in Toronto got me recognized as that season's all-star, and the league invited all-stars from every city to one battle at the Mothership in Austin. The club itself is beautiful — built like a theater, with balconies and depth, but it plays like a comedy club, which means the intimacy and acoustics are designed for laughter in a way that makes a packed house feel like the ground is shaking when you're killing. The battle itself wasn't my proudest moment, but the room and the opportunity were incredible. **Gokul** What's actually going through your head walking into a roast battle? **Hershawn** It's all preparation, not flow. I try to be overly prepared for whatever the person next to me might say about me — the obvious thing anyone would notice, and how I'd respond to it. But your material is only there for when there's nothing better to say. If something happens in the room — someone with a wild haircut in the front row, a glass breaking mid-joke — you have to address it, because if you don't, people know you're not really present, that you're just running a script. In a roast, if someone lands something vicious and it's getting a big laugh, you have to be ready to flip it back on them in real time, or fall back to your next-strongest prepared line if you can't. That's the flow state — it only kicks in because your material is secondary in that moment to what's actually happening in the room. **Gokul** How do you think about vulnerability specifically in a roast context? **Hershawn** It's a superpower. There's not much anyone can say about me that actually hurts, because I've already said it about myself in my own act — my height, my skin, being single into my later twenties. When someone roasts me for it, it doesn't land, because I've accepted it. If I flinched, the audience would sense I actually feel a certain way about it, and that reads as weakness. If it bounces off like steel and I flip it back — "yeah, I'm so small I look like the kid you're gonna grab after the show" — the audience sees I wasn't fazed, and that I can turn it around. That's the biggest advantage you can have in a roast battle. ## What family thinks **Gokul** As a South Asian kid pursuing comedy, how did your family take it? **Hershawn** They were concerned at first, understandably — you care about someone and the odds of this working out are low, and stability usually means more to their long-term wellbeing. I also didn't really want them to see me perform for a long time. It wasn't until last summer that they watched me do a full headline set for the first time, after I'd already honed the craft enough to feel proud sharing it. Seeing an actual room full of people laughing through a full hour, seeing that other people took it seriously, made it real to them in a way just hearing about it never could. A lot of what shapes decisions in our culture is "what will people think" — and once they saw other people genuinely enjoying it, it became easier for them to be okay with what I do. ## The Short King Comedy Tour **Gokul** How did you land on the name for the Short King Comedy Tour? **Hershawn** It rolled off the tongue and summed up a lot of what I talk about on stage, but I actually named it before the "short king" joke itself was fully there. I had short king stickers made before the joke could back them up, which forced me to make sure the joke justified the sticker. The name, the poster, and the joke all grew into each other over time rather than arriving all at once. **Gokul** Your mission statement is to use hip hop and comedy to spread love, laughter, and unity. Why make that explicit? **Hershawn** If you're in a creative field for the money, especially comedy or music, you're in it for the wrong reasons — until you're at the very top, the money isn't there. What separates people who stick with it from people who fizzle out is that intrinsic thing: genuinely loving it, wanting it to make other people happy too. Bringing a whole room of strangers together to laugh at the same thing, people who'd never otherwise have been in that room, is one of the best feelings there is. If you're chasing the money instead of that feeling, you're going to be very disappointed. ## Betting on himself **Gokul** Ten years out, where do you want to be? **Hershawn** A full-time touring headliner across clubs and hopefully theaters in Canada, the US, maybe England — undeniable at the craft, bringing people together, at a very high level. I haven't even been doing this ten years yet, so the next ten are the ones where that has to show up. **Gokul** Do you see this as a gamble? **Hershawn** It's a gamble on myself, but one I can't really afford to lose. If I fail, it's on me; if I succeed, it's on me too, with some fortunate factors along the way. Once you frame it that way, it changes your decision-making — "I'm too tired to go to this open mic" stops being an option. Whatever tired means for someone in a different field, that's the mentality: this is non-negotiable, because this is what you do. **Gokul** What's the scariest thing for you? **Hershawn** Hurting the people around me along the way. Chasing this is an inherently selfish choice — my family didn't sign up for it, my partner didn't sign up for it. There's a real chance I have to live conservatively for a long stretch, and I'm scared of a moment where my parents need me and I can't be there because I chose to tell jokes on the street instead. That fear motivates me to get where I need to go as fast as I can, so I never end up in that position. It takes a toll sometimes, but those fears keep me moving. **Gokul** Last question — what do you think your secret goal is, beyond the money? **Hershawn** It's not really a secret if you've listened to this whole conversation: whatever you're trying to do, you can do it at the highest level, but it's going to be incredibly difficult, and you need belief in yourself and a willingness to sacrifice. If you truly believe in what you're doing, for the right reasons, and you keep working at it with everything you've got, the results might not come immediately, but they're inevitable. Luck is just what happens when preparation meets opportunity — if you're constantly preparing, and the opportunity does show up, it's on you to make the most of it. I've seen people get opportunities they weren't ready for, and it shows in the product. Discipline is the thing that matters most. --- Back to the [episode page](https://useful.ventures/podcast/hershawn-arora-comedy) · [[podcast|All episodes]]